Retinal Bleed

Did you know that cockroaches can’t go in reverse?

Seriously. Front and turns. That’s it.

Julie’s aunt works in Emergency in New York, and nurses really have the best stories.

But cockroaches.

They like dark, moist places, did you know that?

Well, they do, and think about that when you’re lying in bed tonight, because her aunt says that they like to burrow in people’s ears while they’re sleeping.

But they get stuck when they can’t back out.

Antennae on your eardrums.

Wicked.

Julie doesn’t have roaches at hers, but Chicago does have rats the size of small kindergarteners. Sans their plastic, foamy cartoon backpacks, just for clarification.

She sees the rats on the El tracks when she has to take rides in the middle of the nights.

It’s most nights, really.

Like last night, she sat across from a homeless man who had a parrot on his shoulder.

The man was homeless, but the bird had a sweater.

She’s had a couple of good giggle fits about it, thinking about it, today.

Julie doesn’t do rats—worse than cockroaches for her—but it’s weird because from above, on the platform, she fixates on them—no fear—almost trance-like, hypnotized—by the rats.

If the rats were even with her, on her plane, if we could take the height of the platform from the tracks and flip it into a width, and add it to the width of the rats’ distance away from Julie now, she’d be terrified of the rats. Even though, technically, they’d be farther away from her then than they are now.

Pythagorean Theorem.

But it’s because the rats could get to her then.

Can rats climb walls?

Julie looks down.

Her gynecologist told her that she has a dissociative disorder.

Depersonalization, to be precise.

Julie didn’t think that her ass doctor was super qualified to make that particular diagnosis, per se, but mostly, she got pissed at the “disorder” part.

The use of that word.

“Carefully crafted, I’d say.”

“I only do it so it can’t get to me.”

Doc said, “Julie, you should really go for EMDR.”

Julie doesn’t know how to explain what happens to her in the late nights and early mornings like this. She has night terrors and wakes up her neighbors and pisses herself and one time shat herself.

Julie won’t ever forget the morning that she woke up with shit in her pants.

She had a salty, teary trail that had dried across her nose, and her hair was so wired and out that she looked like she’d buried her tongue in an electrical socket.

Mostly, she wakes up in such pain that she can’t stop shaking until she goes for one of her rides.

Pressed for time, sometimes she doesn’t even wear shoes.

Julie can’t handle everyone being dead.

She feels terrible loss.

The Suicides—her mother, Aunt Karen, Zack, eight friends.

The Cancers—her father, grandmothers, and pretty much everyone, everywhere.

The Fires—Miracle and D’Andre.

The Murders—Uncle Mike, Kamesha, and Robo.

She can’t handle it, so she doesn’t.

The pain is white gory insipid, and it spawns out from somewhere under her third left rib.

Julie gazes down as a rat gnaws on the rotting carcass of a one-legged pigeon.

Nubbed, oozy mucus.

She doesn’t know that she’ll be blind in ten years.

Look up. Maybe you can see Julie. She’s that gray thing floating there, with the bleeding empty eye sockets and the pulsing veins.